Bread

Spiritual Foods has offered a few suggestions that you can follow to store your bread. These suggestions will also ensure that your bread stays fresh and lasts longer.

Hot/Humid Weather · Bread is best stored in paper or cloth (dishtowel) bags during humid weather. Bread can be stored for up to one week in paper/cloth bags. · Storing bread in a plastic bag during humid weather can cause bread to mold after a few days. If you do use plastic it is best to refrigerate after a couple of days, however refrigeration is not the best, see below.

Cold Weather or Dry Air · In the winter, either paper/cloth or plastic bags are fine. Plastic will keep the bread longer (even without refrigeration or freezing).

"This bread is a gift from the gods. I haven't had anything like it since my childhood days back home in South Africa. I would rather have a sandwich with this bread anyday than go to a fancy restaurant!"

~Norman

General Storage · Refrigeration of bread causes it to go stale and dry out. · Freezing is preferred over refrigeration. · Slicing before freezing allows it to be used one slice at a time.

If bread does become stale: · Warm in the oven for 10-15 minutes (only for that use, don’t reheat twice). · Toast the bread. Steam in a vegetable steamer briefly for up to 5 minutes

More Information on Sourdough

"Just got my new bread order today.It tastes better than ever.They must be putting more love in it."

~ Ron

The Karma In Bread-making:

The dough has a better memory than you.All sins of omission or commission will be revealed later in the bread.

by Sarah Thomas Gulden

Gluten and Yeast

Sourdough (or, more formally, natural leaven or levain)
refers to the process of leavening bread by capturing wild yeasts in a dough or
batter, as opposed to using a domestic, purpose-cultured yeast such as
Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Sourdough more specifically refers to a symbiotic
culture of lactobacilli and yeasts, giving a distinctively tangy or sour taste
(hence its name), due mainly to the lactic acid and acetic acid produced by the
lactobacilli.

Sourdough bread is made by using a small amount (20-25 percent)
of "starter" dough (sometimes known as "the mother
sponge"), which contains the yeast culture, and mixing it with new flour
and water. Part of this resulting dough is then saved to use as the starter for
the next batch. As long as the starter dough is fed flour and water daily, the
sourdough mixture can stay in room temperature indefinitely and remain healthy
and usable. It is not uncommon for a baker's starter dough to have years of
history, from many hundreds of previous batches. As a result, each bakery's
sourdough has a distinct taste.The
combination of starter, yeast culture and air temperature, humidity, and
elevation also makes each batch of sourdough different.(Wikipedia: Sourdough)

True sourdough technique does not use baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).It is rather a combination of wild yeast
(often Candida milleri) and an
acid-generating bacteria (Lactobacillus
sanfrancisco). Baker’s yeast is a hybrid fungus, which is used in
commercial baking for its quick rising action, shortening the fermentation
time. The longer fermentation time of sourdough baking breaks the protein down
into amino acids, making the bread more readily digestible. Baker’s yeast does
not allow the bacteria and yeast interaction, so the beneficial lactic acids and
acetic acid are missing from the bread product. In order to maximize the
benefits of sourdough, non-commercially processed high quality ingredients are
essential.

Commercial grain processing today strips out bran, germ, B
vitamins, vitamin E, chromium, magnesium, manganese and zinc from flour. In
total, about 20 minerals and vitamins are lost to a significant degree. These
essential nutrients are the first to be lost in commercial flour processing
because they’re volatile, especially when stored for a long time.

It was common to store white flour for months to allow
oxygen to condition it. Storage costs, spoilage, and losses due to insects
caused commercial processors to use chemical additives.Chemical oxidizing agents or bleaches were
used for two reasons: 1) they produced the same conditioning effects of oxygen
in a shorter time; 2) they bleached the flour to a whiter color. Currently the
Health Protection Branch in Canada
allows the addition of almost 30 different chemicals in commercially produced flours.Consequently, these flours are
"enriched," which is doublespeak for the substitution of natural
vitamins and minerals with synthetically produced vitamins.Enriched flour doesn’t provide substitutes
for everything taken out of the original, however. The trace mineral chromium,
for example, is commonly forgotten.

(Shasha Navazesh Toronto, ON., Source: alive #217, November
2000)

All of Saul and Jolynn’s breads except their oatmeal bread
(which uses both yeasts) are sourdough breads in that they use the much
healthier sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast.Saul and Jolynn Schwartz are the bakers at
Sweetwater Bakery, housed at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, who make the
bread we provide through Spiritual Food CSA.

People get wheat allergies because of the general difficulty
in digesting yeast and gluten.Sourdough
starter essentially starts to digest the yeast and conditions the gluten before
we eat it, so we can get more nutrition from it.Additionally many people with wheat allergies
report having no problems digesting this bread (though this would depend on how
strong an allergy one has and one’s individual health).Katherine Czapp, writing about her father in
an article in Wise Traditions called "Our Daily Bread" Spring
2003, tells us her father diagnosed with celiac disease (gluten intolerance)
was able to eat sourdough, slow fermented bread.

A long slow fermentation or the slow rise process used by
Saul and Jolynn also helps make the wheat assimilate better.Ms. Czapp’s father was even able to tolerate
oats, corn and spelt in moderation after regularly eating the sourdough bread.
Most commercial breads rise quickly, an hour or so, while a minimum of four
hours is needed and Saul and Jolynn actually spend eight hours rising their dough.

The idea with these careful process is to soften the bran in
whole wheat which is quite strong, and, in fact, unhealthy for you. Soaking wheat bran overnight helps some, but
fermenting makes a bigger impact and slow-rising can neutralize phytates. Wheat
bran contains phytates, which, if it isn’t soaked or fermented first, binds
with minerals and will actually pull minerals out of your body.

Did you know that Candida
and Anemia are related to the
consumption of yeasted bread?These
chronic calcium deficiencies can be avoided or resolved using natural leavening
as stated in "A Grain of Salt," Spring 2000.

The pH level of naturally leaven bread versus commercially
yeasted breads makes the difference.The
pH levels of the naturally leaven dough is about 4.8 in dough kept at 64
degrees Fahrenheit and for total hydrolysis you need pH between 4 and 5.6
maximum.The pH of commercially yeasted
dough is 5.9 to 6.5.

Brick Oven

All the bread that Saul and Jolynn bake for Spiritual Foods
CSA is baked in their own special brick oven, which was designed by a friend
and hand-made. They had three successive other ovens before this one in their
previous home in Virginia; this one in Pennsylvania is their
largest yet.The oven is just a chamber
made of 4 inches of firebricks reinforced with 6 inches of concrete on the
outside.It is a massive structure, both
for strength and to have the right amount of mass to be able to hold the heat
in.Since they bake many batches of
bread after the fire has gone out, it’s important for the heat to be held by
the masonry and that the whole structure is well insulated.With the incredible heat it gives off, the
oven is built outside the building, but there is an inside door and it does
heat the room the door opens into.The
oven has a chimney in front and outside of it, which allows some heat out when
the fire is burning, but it is closed for the baking process.

The bread-baking process in such an oven is interesting
since the bread is baked in the same place in the chamber that the fire
is.Saul and Jolynn first light a fire
that burns all day and they cook the following day after a careful job of
cleaning out the ashes.Just before
baking, they spray the oven with a hose to create more steam.

The special thing about such an oven is that you can seal it
off.Conventional ovens need to be
ventilated so either you loose all the steam or they have to use complicated
equipment to inject steam during baking as opposed to the natural process
inherent in the brick oven.Steam is
wonderful for baking bread—it lets the crust be soft for longer to ultimately
make a crisper crust.

Lastly, a brick oven provides radiant heat from its bricks
as opposed to conventional convection oven, which uses hot air.That cooks the bread faster (their first
batch usually takes 15 minutes), which gives the bread a nice quality, allowing
it to be softer, lighter, and chewier.

The Mill and the Whole Grain Wheat Flour

All the wheat used in Saul and Jolynn’s bread for the CSA is
biodynamic and comes from Kirschenmann’s farm in North Dakota.While regular and organic grains can all be
run through the same machines, the biodynamic process requires scrupulous
cleaning after a non-biodynamic grain has run through, a process which can take
a day or more.This is one reason it is
hard to find biodynamic grains available commercially.

The Sweetwater bakery receives the wheat grain from
Spiritual Food and mills it one batch at a time for the freshest, flour
possible.The stone mill, belonging to
the Camphill Community who allows the Schwartz’s to use it for all their baking
there, takes about an hour and half to grind 50 lbs.

Whole-grain stone ground flour doesn’t need to be enriched.
In addition, there are several other advantages to stone ground whole
grains.The endosperm, bran, and germ
are in their natural, original proportions, allowing for higher and better
nutrient absorption.Stone grinding is
slower, so the germ is not exposed to high temperatures. Heat causes the fat
from the germ portion to oxidize and become rancid, destroying many of the
vitamins (particularly fat soluble ones such as vitamin E).Stone ground flour is usually coarser,
reducing the loss of nutrients due to oxygen exposure...The nutrients in real
sourdough bread are more bio-available and easier to digest, and the bread
retains natural dietary fibers.If you
eat bread, eat naturally cultured sourdough.

(Shasha Navazesh Toronto, ON., Source: alive #217, November
2000)

Saul and Jolynn’s bread is made from a highly personal
process—they mix the dough by hand and as stated above, they have a unique
strand of sourdough starter derived from years of baking. No one cold make
bread exactly like this bread.This is a
process they taught themselves and they put a lot of care into.